Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides is best known for his gripping, deeply researched non-fiction works that focus on classic episodes from American history, stories often set in war or depicting epic adventures of survival, exploration, frontier life, or first contact between disparate worlds. He’s the author of the bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground. His most recent book, The Wide Wide Sea, follows Captain James Cook’s ill-fated final voyage and its complex and controversial legacy. The Wide Wide Sea was named one of 2024’s Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, was featured on Barack Obama’s coveted Summer Reading List, and has been optioned for the screen.

Sides’ talks, often accompanied by slideshows or multi-media presentations, enthrall audiences with the white-knuckle stories behind his epic books. He discusses his writing process and how he ties findings from obscure documents and his own exploration trips into his work. Sides’ discussions often focus on intriguing questions of leadership and ethics that arise in extremely difficult wilderness or battlefield situations—examining what qualities of training, attitude, and spirit cause some groups to prevail while others falter.

Sides’ books are non-fiction page turners that elucidate consequential moments of American history—from the conquest of the West, to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; from the first official US attempt on the North Pole during the Gilded Age, to the greatest battle of the Korean War. What UK writer and literary critic Sir Stephen Fry said of The Wide Wide Sea could be said of all Sides’ books: “Extraordinarily compulsive and fascinating on every page.”

Sides has been a contributor to Outside, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. His journalistic work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.

A native of Memphis and a Yale graduate, Sides is a board member of the Society of American Historians and the Author’s Guild, and he was a Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Aspen Institute, the Cross Foundation, and Stanford University. He has an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Colorado College. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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